Web Hosting Services – Southfield, MI – Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento eCommerce hosting, is proud to announce the availability of Turpentine, a free and open-source Magento extension that modifies Magento’s behavior to improve integration with the HTTP accelerator, Varnish.

As part of an ongoing commitment to ever-improving Magento hosting services, Nexcess has created the Turpentine Magento extension, which solves a number of problems that were preventing Varnish from being used to its fullest functionality with Magento. Varnish is a very fast caching reverse proxy that can significantly increase the speed at which web pages are served and reduce lag time for users. Research has shown that slow page-loading on eCommerce stores can have a major impact on the proportion of sales that are completed; decreasing latency both improves the consumer experience and helps increase conversion rates.

There are a number of aspects of Magento’s design that can mitigate the effectiveness of Varnish. Turpentine was created to overcome this and allow full Magento page caching with minimal configuration, the ability to force static asset caching, and the application of Varnish VCLs without restarting Varnish. The result is a significant improvement on the cache hit rate compared to installations not using Turpentine.

“We’re extremely pleased with the performance of Turpentine. We’re seeing major improvements in server response times for our optimized Magento hosting plans,” commented Chris Wells, President and CEO of Nexcess, “By releasing the extension under an open-source licence, we’re happy to be giving something of value to the community that has helped us expand our business.”

Turpentine is immediately available for download on Github and directly from Magento Connect. Turpentine is compatible with all modern versions of Magento Community and Enterprise editions.

About Nexcess
Nexcess is a Southfield, Michigan-based managed hosting company founded in 2000, with wholly-owned data centers located in Dearborn and Southfield, Michigan. Nexcess offers a variety of hosting services ranging from entry-level packages to custom clustered/complex hosting configurations, with an emphasis on mission-critical hosting for high-profile eCommerce web sites. For more information, please visit http://www.nexcess.net.